User-oriented FEC decoding scheme for wireless sensor networks with star topologies

Abstract

In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have attracted a great deal of research attention from both academia and industry. In most cases, WSNs employ the adaptive forward error correction (FEC) coding schemes dynamically adapting to the channel, while paying less attention to user's requirements. Sometimes, the decoding delay and the decoding performance of WSNs are more crucial than the power consumption for users. We propose an FEC decoder for the trade-off among decoding delay, complexity, and performance according to user's needs. The proposed decoder designed for short packet transmission is a two-stage hybrid decoder (TSHD) including a serial min-sum decoder and an adaptive list decoder. For hard decision decoding, our simulation results show that the proposed TSHD scheme outperforms the existing schemes with less average complexity.